Certain embodiments of the present invention relate to a medical diagnostic ultrasound scanner. More particularly, certain embodiments relate to a method and system for configuring a personal digital assistant (PDA) device as an integral part of a portable, hand-held ultrasound system.
Traditional ultrasound systems are often large and bulky and do not lend themselves for ease of portability and tend to be expensive. Therefore, traditional ultrasound systems are not practical for certain market segments such as emergency medical personnel in ambulances, medical school students in training, and physicians and nurses at remote locations.
For example, today, emergency medical personnel (EMP) may use a stethoscope to listen to a patient's chest for lung rattles, or abdominal sounds such as bowel noise, or heart murmurs, etc. If equipped with ultrasound, the EMP could see fluid in the lungs, movement of the bowel, or blood flow in the heart. A more portable type of ultrasound system is required for such an application.
Smaller systems exist but are often still too expensive and/or do not provide desired features. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,106,472 to Chiang et al., a portable ultrasound imaging system is described that uses charge coupled device (CCD) technology and performs beamforming in the analog domain. Such an implementation is limited by the specialized CCD technology and by performing beamforming in the analog domain.
It is more desirable to perform beamforming in the digital domain by first converting ultrasound data from the analog domain to the digital domain by, for example, using a simple analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Beamforming in the digital domain provides more flexibility and potentially better accuracy than beamforming in the analog domain.
A need exists for a small, inexpensive, highly portable ultrasound system employing existing technology that may be used quickly and easily for basic diagnosis in emergency situations at remote locations and for training purposes. A need also exists to perform digital beamforming in a highly portable ultrasound system in order increase beamforming flexibility and remove the need for specialized hardware.